You are getting towards what should be your middle years, neither young nor old. Life has been good and, it seems, will continue to be so. But you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and are blown to pieces by a bomb. Does anything bad happen to you; is it bad for you, when this bomb goes off? Most of us say yes. Just a few say no. But many of those saying yes acknowledge that there are difficulties in explaining how it can be that death is bad for the one who dies. I agree that there are difficulties here. But perhaps their number and their extent have been exaggerated. Some of the best known and most discussed puzzles about the evil of death can, at least in outline, be fairly easily solved. I deal with three of these here. But others are more resilient. I discuss several examples in Chapter 5.

Some clarification. First, the focus, for now, is on a case like that just sketched. I shall call it a prime of life case. Change any of the details – age, how life is going, circumstances – and what we say about death's badness may well be different. We can consider such changes later. Second, this idea of something's being bad will for now be assumed to be roughly intelligible.